In terms of design and construction, what's the most sophisticated object you possess and regularly use? If you're a motorist, it's undoubtedly a car. The average vehicle has about 30,000 parts (according to Toyota, the world's largest car manufacturer), if you count every nut and bolt. A bunch of those parts are made out of valuable materials that could be recycled--if they could be extracted from the damn thing.

However, the precision with which automotive factories assemble cars does not lead to precision disassembly. Industrial-strength adhesives, welding, one-way fasteners and more are the status quo, as if cars will live forever. As a result, this is the simultaneously insane, barbaric and impressive actions that have to be taken to dismantle a car in search of the good bits:

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What you're looking at here is called the VRS (Vehicle Recycling System) Car Dismantler. It's powered by an HX180 excavator which is, ironically, manufactured by carmaker Hyundai.

I will say I'm impressed by the operator's precision and training. You can see him separating the good bits--"Here's the engine block, that's got some good metal in it, let's put it in this pile"--from the bad: "Here's the radiator, with some pesky fluids in it, let's throw this in the dumpster."

Lastly, here's a side view of a similar "processing" system:

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